'Fessing up

In his November 2009 "Discourse" for the Phase 2 Players Community, Robert Scheinfeld talked about Phase 2 Players who were aware of the Busting Loose Model, who understood it in theory, but who had not yet bust loose. I believe I fall into that category. That is in contrast to what I claimed in my blog post entitled I bust loose. Woo hoo!

As Robert said in his Discourse, Phase 2 Players often experience a certain amount of euphoria just from their awareness of the Busting Loose Model. Actually reaching the busting loose point, however, typically takes time.

In the Woo hoo! blog entry, I claimed to have bust loose from the Relationships Game. Well ... ummm ... hmmm ... maybe I haven't bust loose from the Relationships Game after all. In the interim I have encountered a few little bumps on the road, and my feelings about them have not always been those of an enlightened being.

But, with that having been said, I am finding that even an intellectual understanding of the Busting Loose Model does feel helpful to me. I have faith in the wisdom of my Expanded Self. Therefore the version of me that is the Player in the Earth Amusement Park can relax more than she historically was able to do.

I'm sharing this updated assessment of my progress in case it helps to reassure those of you who are waiting and waiting and waiting to bust loose. I don't want to pose as something I'm not.

Inside Passage

The three-and-a-half days that I spent in the Inside Passage workshop were very profound for me.

The workshop was about forgiveness and finding my authentic self.

FORGIVENESS

In previous workshops, journal writing and other interior work, I already had gone a long way towards resolving issues with my parents. The relationship that still required some closure, it seemed to me, was the one with my ex husband. So that was the one on which I focused during Inside Passage.

Although I did the workshop exercises with my ex husband in mind, I emerged with a sense of forgiveness towards myself. Because of my adherence to the Busting Loose Model, I already had come to believe, at an intellectual level at least, that I had done nothing "wrong" and that there was no reason for guilt. But it was one thing to believe that in my head, as I previously had done, and it was another thing to accept it in my heart, as I came to do during the workshop. This time I really, really "got" it.

The distinction between head and heart is a spurious concept according to the Busting Loose Model. The entire earthly construct is an illusion, so apparent divisions also are illusions. However, when we humans devised language, we did so in order to discuss our Phase 1 universe. Therefore it can be very challenging to find language that is adequate to the task of discussing our lives in Phase 2.

Suffice it to say, I emerged from the workshop feeling several pounds lighter. Although the illusion that I call my body no doubt remained unchanged, my subjective perception was that I had shed a burden. That "weight" had been a sort of vague, unnamed sense of guilt. It had created a type of static, a background noise in my life, if you will.

The spell that my father cast on me and the worst "harm" that I did to my husband, which was to marry him in the first place, were related to each other. What I have come to see, at the age of 57, is that I enrolled my husband in dumbing me down. What I mean is that I deliberately chose a domineering life partner because he would squelch my ambition to accomplish feats on my own behalf. That, in turn, would keep me safe from my father, who was threatened by smart family members. (If you don't know my story about my dad and if you think it would help you to make sense of this current blog entry, you can find my account in this previous blog entry.)

In one sense I could claim not to have been aware of that when I married at the age of 21. Indeed, there were many levels on which I was oblivious to the dynamics. At the time of our marriage, I believed myself to be in love with my husband.

But, when I look back on it, I feel that I ignored warning signs. I was like Blue Beard's bride who was captivated by his magnificent horse and livery and who ignored the blueness of his beard.

So I did my husband a great disservice by marrying him. In Phase 1 terms, I was the wrong woman for him. (But, in Phase 2 terms, we were just right for each other, because we helped each other to lock in the Phase 1 Miracle, which was to convince ourselves that we were the opposite of the powerful beings that we really were.)

My initial "wrong" towards my husband led to a 35-year series of other wrongs. While he was the aggressive aggressive partner, I usually was the passive aggressive one (but sometimes aggressive aggressive too). I'm sure it must have been just as much hell for him to be married to me as it was for me to be married to him.

There also is the aftermath of our marriage. Now that we're separated, we miss each other terribly, even if we recognize that we're wrong for each other. I think that, of the two of us, my husband suffers from loneliness more than I do. Although they are not enough to fill the void entirely, I do have a lot of distractions in the form of the new life that I've created in Nanaimo, my cohousing community, the new friends I've made, and the workshops in which I've participated.

So those were the "sins" for which I forgave myself during the workshop. They were my marrying him, my passive aggressive behaviour towards him while we were married, and the painful fallout from the end of our marriage. Perhaps my forgiveness of myself was incomplete. Maybe it will be a lifelong process. But I sure did make considerable inroads during Inside Passage.

MY LIFE'S MISSION

Another gift that I received was the discovery that my highest directive was not to build community, to mentor and to teach, as previous workshops in the Excellence series had indicated to me. Rather, it was to live fully. I came to see it as my life's work to wake from the slumber to which a fairy godmother, in the form of my father, had condemned me. Yes, I love building community, mentoring and teaching, and I most likely will continue those activities. But living life to the max is even more important.

According to the Busting Loose Model, one lives in reactive mode. One wakes up each morning and asks oneself what one wants to do that day. There is no long term plan. So the idea of a "highest directive" for one's life seems irrelevant.

The whole point of moving into Phase 2 is to experience what Robert Scheinfeld calls True Joy. In that sense, my personal mission of living fully is a universal one. But it just happens that the specific way in which my Expanded Self locked in the Phase 1 Miracle is a particularly apt metaphor for the wider Human Game. That is, at some level Little Judy believed herself to be in mortal danger if she revealed who she really was. So I now experience it as a delicious phenomenon when I feel as if I have "permission" to show up as I am.

PHASE 1 RESOURCES

Last night I was mulling over my enduring fondness for these Phase 1 workshops now that I've committed to Phase 2.

Robert Scheinfeld says that, once one has crossed over into Phase 2, there is no such thing as a Phase 1 teacher, a Phase 1 book, a Phase 1 workshop, or a Phase 1 treatment modality. Anything and everything in the Phase 1 world can be appropriated and used for Phase 2 purposes.

In my case, I've just realized that these Phase 1 involvements help me to access my emotions, which is the first step of the Phase 2 "Process." The next step of The Process, after one has allowed the feelings to build up to the maximum intensity, is to tell oneself that the situation is an illusion.

I find that, when I implement The Process on my own, I do it in a rather mechanical way. I say the words to myself, as if by rote. But I find it difficult to sink into the so called negative emotion associated with a given experience.

Although this rather unfeeling way of carrying out The Process has reaped results for me, I find it more fun and rewarding to combine The Process with deeper feelings. Those deeper feelings, in turn, seem to be more easily accessible to me when I communicate directly with other people.

I also experience it as a great privilege when people share intimate details of their lives with me. I feel deep empathy when they let me into their inner circle and tell me that their mother abandoned them or their brother committed suicide or their uncle sexually abused them and how they feel about that. I know that, from a Phase 2 point of view, all of those stories are irrelevant. But for people living in the Phase 1 world, those kinds of experiences create heavy emotions. I feel very close to them when they share their lives with me.

Another aspect of the workshop that was most enjoyable was the humour. Although we did some difficult exercises that brought up sobs and tears, we also did activities that broke the tension and had us splitting our sides with laughter.

Robert says that, once we enter Phase 2, the illusions that we call "other people" play one or more roles for us:

(1) They bother us, which gives us an opportunity to practice the Phase 2 tools, such as The Process.

(2) They act as a catalyst to set in motion something that we need for our journey.

(3) They say something that provides us with an insight that we need.

(4) They provide us with an opportunity to have fun and enjoy the Earth Amusement Park.

I would say that my fellow Inside Passage workshop participants played all four of those roles for me. I appreciate them very, very much.

Foggy Brain

I am part way into a three-and-a-half day seminar called Inside Passage. Its purpose is to "decide and declare, discover and create the best of who you are."

We are addressing our personal vision and our relationships. We are working on acquiring compassion and forgiveness, both towards ourselves and towards another person with whom we have an unresolved issue.

At the beginning of the seminar, our facilitator asked each of us to stand up and state our name, what we wanted to get out of the seminar and what we thought our greatest barrier was to getting what we wanted.

I said my name was Judy, I didn't know what I wanted to get out of the seminar, and my greatest barrier was that I didn't know what I wanted.

When I was working in a small group of four people today, one of the members of that group shared what felt to me like a very important fact after we'd already worked together for three hours. She mentioned this central fact of her life in passing, almost as if it was a throw-away line.

When she did that, I felt angry towards her. The reason for my anger was that I had poured my heart and soul into assisting her during the preceding three hours. I had grappled with what seemed like a complex issue, and had racked my brain to help her in finding more clarity.

The salient fact that she then mentioned as if by accident was so huge that it just blew me away. If only she had shared that at the outset of our work together, it would have made all the difference.

Her "forgetting" to tell us this highly relevant piece of information might have been understandable if we'd been a bunch of newbies. But, in order to register for Inside Passage, all of us had to be graduates of the Pursuit of Excellence and The Wall. In exchanging pleasantries with this woman at the beginning of the seminar, I knew that she also was a graduate of the Advancement of Excellence. So we're talking about a person who has done a considerable amount of self development work. It just did not feel plausible to me that such a person could have "forgotten" to mention what seemed to me to be the single most important piece of information about her life.

I also could have understood her withholding the information from us if the environment had been unsafe. But really conscious people participate in the workshops that Excellence Seminars International puts on. By the time we make it to Inside Passage, we can be confident that our fellow participants have integrity. So I expect everyone in the room to participate to the maximum extent possible. To me that includes full disclosure in small group activities.

A few minutes after I'd felt anger towards this woman welling up inside of me, I realized that her withholding critical information had pushed one of my hot buttons. I recalled the elephant in my family of origin's living room. That had been my father's dyslexia, which I mentioned in my blog post entitled My Incomparable Dad. It seemed to me that, even after I thought I'd come to terms with it, I still must have been feeling hurt by my parents' secrecy. That probably explained why my reaction to my team member's apparent secrecy was disproportionate to the seriousness of her "transgression." I might add that it was a slip up that did not bother our other two team members in the slightest.

While I was driving home from the seminar venue tonight, I reviewed that whole thing about my father. I recalled how it had felt safer for me when I had suppressed how smart and capable I actually was. Then a light bulb went off for me. I realized that that also explained why I often felt confused about what I wanted. Confusion was safe, because nothing could be pinned on me, and I couldn't be blamed for it. The picture that came to me was of a dog fight in the First World War. I visualized a pilot ducking into a bank of clouds to escape the crossfire.

The thing you need to understand if you want to know what it has felt like to be Judy for most of the last 57 years is that Judy did not know that she was smart while she chose to present a dumbed down version of herself to the rest of the world. Rather, to feel safe, Judy hid even from herself the fact that she was smart.

Actually that is a good illustration of what all of us do to pull off what Robert Scheinfeld calls the Phase 1 Miracle. All of us players in the Earth Amusement Park hide from ourselves our true power. The special effects that are required to convince an infinite being that he or she is limited are very sophisticated indeed.

As soon as I became aware that my confusion was an artificial device, a whole bunch of things became clear to me. I knew at once what I wanted to get out of the seminar. I instantly knew answers that had eluded me during today's exercises as well as the answer to the most important question in tonight's homework assignment.

My recognition of my own mental fog also gave me compassion for my team member in the small group exercise. I could see how a vitally important fact about her life could have escaped her attention during our work together.

Postscript. It occurs to me that this blog post contains a lot of Phase 1 language and assumptions. If you've come here expecting to find insights into Phase 2, it seems to me that this post may confuse you. I apologize for that.

Fear

At the moment, the area in which I'm experiencing the greatest challenges is the Money Game. Most of the other games in my Earth Amusement Park are bringing me joy.

One of the things that I find difficult to do is to maintain a boundary between the catastrophic thinking of the Phase 1 players around me and myself.

My choice in the handling of "my" money is:

(1) to do what I would love to do even if it looks risky from a conventional point of view; or

(2) hold myself back from doing what I would love to do in order to follow what most people would consider a safer strategy.

I find it requires discipline to avoid succumbing to fear. I am doing Robert Scheinfeld's suggested "Process" over and over.

I also find it helpful to remind myself of Robert's Transformative Vocabulary Tool. For example, when I'm in a situation in which, in the past, I would have "paid" for something, I now think in terms of "expressing appreciation" for it.

A Return to Love

A friend recently lent me his copy of A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. Half way into it, I can say this book is a gem.

The subtitle is, "Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles." I read part of A Course in Miracles about five years ago. It had what I thought were good ideas, but I found it long winded and boring. Part way through, I stopped reading thoroughly and started skimming.

I don't know if A Course in Miracles really was all that poorly written or if I didn't want to listen to what it had to say.

In any event, here I am today, getting the succinct version from Marianne Williamson. My reaction this time around is, "Wow! This is dynamite."

I once heard someone asking Robert Scheinfeld if his body of work was similar to A Course in Miracles. He responded that it was not.

Interestingly enough, I find the opposite to be true for me. I see many parallels between Scheinfeld's Busting Loose Model and Williamson's message. Both of them invite you to drop Judgement and Fear. What Scheinfeld refers to as True Joy seems identical to what Williamson calls Love.

Williamson says:

Love is real. It's an eternal creation and nothing can destroy it.

Anything that isn't love is an illusion.

Remember this, and you'll be at peace.

It is the simplest of concepts and the most challenging of accomplishments.

Mayan Calendar

Recently my chiropractor, Dr. Norm Detillieux of The LifeHouse in Nanaimo, British Columbia, helped me to tame time.

In my experience, Norm is intuitive. Without my telling him, he seems to know what's going on with me. I don't have any desire to lie to him, but it in any case would be impossible for me to do so.

During a couple of my recent visits to him, Norm told me that he felt as if I was spinning. He was spot on. I had so much going on in my life that I felt overwhelmed.

Robert Scheinfeld says that you should live in what he calls reactive mode. You should get up every morning and do whatever you feel moved to do. Hmmm ....... That's all well and good. But my lifestyle involves heaps of commitments, and many of them are set up a long time in advance.

Anyway, back to Norm ....... He recommended that I watch a presentation that Ian Xel Lungold had given on the Mayan Calendar. Norm lent me the DVD. I watched it this past weekend, and found it inspiring.

Lungold said that, in the modern world, our minds use time and space as their reference points. The nature of our civilization is reflected in the simplistic calendar that we use. Our approach to time results in our viewing ourselves, and therefore treating ourselves, like objects. At birth, the clock starts ticking. Information about our age as well as the dates on the calendar are used to determine when we have to go to school, work, pay taxes, and so on.

The calendars of several other civilizations, in contrast, incorporated elements besides time. The Mayan Calendar, for example, included personal (soul) intent as well as divine intent. That created recognition of, and respect for, something beyond the physical world.

One of the problems with focusing primarily on the physical environment is that the human mind can process only so many bits of information per second. When you hear the number, it sounds large, but in fact it's inadequate. In our busy world, there simply is more happening than we can cope with.

Lungold said that the solution was to switch to intuition, literally to go out of our minds.

He used the example of a near death experience. People who have been in car accidents report that everything went into slow motion. The reason was that, in a life threatening situation, we switch to another mode, the intuitive one. Our intuition has a much more expansive capacity than our mind.

When Lungold brought up the topic of extreme danger, I recalled a vehicle accident in which I'd been at the age of seven. The rear tire on the Land Rover that my mother was driving burst, and the vehicle turned over. We had no seat belts in those days, and I hurtled through the windshield.

I remember the experience vividly. It was the most violent event of my life so far. I recall the pain I felt as my body was bashed about. I was choked and blinded by the dust that was stirred up on the dirt road. Talk about sensory overload.

Luckily, I emerged relatively unscathed. I had a few cuts on my legs, and one of those cuts required a stitch. But that was it. Considering what had happened, I was very fortunate.

Now, as I recall that accident, I feel very safe. That may seem paradoxical. The point is that, for all the the peril and discomfort I was in, I came through okay.

When things have felt busy during the last couple of days, I have pictured the accident. I have imagined that the current people, commitments, and clutter are like the metal, glass and dust that whirled around me. Then I have imagined myself flying through the chaos and landing safely, as I did in the case of the accident. I also have imagined everything slowing down, as it does during a crash, so I can discern what I want to do next.

That visualization exercise has made all the difference. From an objective point of view, my life is just as full as it was before. But subjectively it feels manageable, sometimes even tranquil.

An "interesting" creation

At the moment my life seems to be firing on all cylinders. I am juggling so many balls, I can hardly believe it.

My new job, with its associated training, has begun -- albeit on a part-time basis at this point. I am finding that exciting but, as I stated before, I am going to wait a while before I share much about that.

My involvement in my cohousing community is deeply meaningful to me, but it does require a time commitment. In addition to my more routine tasks, I'm going to be visiting Roberts Creek Cohousing tomorrow (Thursday) for a consensus decision making workshop that will last through the weekend.

I am continuing to reap benefits from my collaboration with Dr. Norm at The Lifehouse Chiropractic Studio. Yes, the "light touch" method that Norm uses is a Phase 1 creation and, yes, I like it.

On the dating front, I had an interesting experience last weekend. From Friday afternoon through Sunday evening, I went to Vancouver to visit with a man whom I had "met" on a match making website.

That involved a one-and-a-half hour ferry ride across the Georgia Strait in each direction. This man and I had gotten on like a house on fire via emails and phone calls. For a variety of reasons it wasn't convenient for him to visit Nanaimo until December, so I agreed to travel to Vancouver instead. The voyage on the ferry is beautiful, so I was more than happy to do it.

In many ways my date was a super person, just as he had seemed to be during long distance communications. He was a talented musician and artist as well as a serious student of yoga in all its dimensions (physical, spiritual, etc.). We had heaps of interests and values in common. He also was respectful, considerate and hospitable towards me.

There was, however, one anomaly. When I met him, he looked older than I had been anticipating. At first it didn't bother me. I didn't want to focus only on physical appearance, as it felt less important to me than other factors.

Several hours into our weekend date, however, he said something that raised a red flag for me. If I remember correctly, he referred to an event that I felt he should have been too young to have witnessed. I came right out and asked him how old he was. He admitted that he was ten years older than the age he had provided on the match making website.

For me that was a trust breaker. What I mean by that is a breach of trust that is significant enough to supersede other considerations. Yes, I found many things about him engaging and fascinating. But they were as nothing compared with the fact that he had lied to me.

But I remained calm. It did occur to me, momentarily, to climb on the next ferry back to Nanaimo. But then I thought, "What the heck? I've invested the time in getting to Vancouver. Why don't I just stay here and make the most of this trip?"

It was a beautiful, sunny weekend. My date lives in Kitsilano, which is a delightful neighbourhood of character homes not far from downtown Vancouver. The streets are lined with trees that were sporting autumn colours. We walked to the beach. Then we walked down Broadway, which is a street lined with cute stores, coffee shops, and the like. We browsed through charming Banyen Books. On Saturday night, we had a delicious meal at East is East.

All in all, it was a pleasant getaway. On my return ferry, I did reflect though that two men with whom I had engaged on match making websites had not played with what I would call a full deck of cards. I merely noticed it. As far as I am concerned, there really is nothing to be done about it. Because I am informed by the Busting Loose model, I believe that my Expanded Self created these behaviours, as it creates everything that I experience in my hologram.

To me this past weekend just felt like a new ride in the Earth Amusement Park. I wonder what's around the next corner.